


pure

by foolondahill17



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Withdrawal, Hell Trauma, Mark of Cain (Supernatural), Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Purgatory, The First Blade (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-08 08:03:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21472726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolondahill17/pseuds/foolondahill17
Summary: Violence brings Dean to a different place: somewhere still, silent, and cold. Ice water in his veins. It’s all silky, wet desire, something raw and uninhibited. And Dean wants. Oh my God, he wants.Sex and violence and everything in between, because sometimes Dean has trouble keeping lust and bloodlust separated in his mind. Or, seven times Dean kills, metaphorically and literally.
Relationships: Benny Lafitte/Dean Winchester, Lisa Braeden/Dean Winchester, Robin (Supernatural: Bad Boys)/Dean Winchester
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22





	pure

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning: general warning for dark/violent headspace, plus specific warnings for violence (including torture, gore, and the sexualization of torture), flashbacks, disassociation, panic attacks, alcohol withdrawal, an allusion toward suicidality, teenage sexuality (where both parties are consenting), and mentions of past non-con. 
> 
> Inspired by the scene in 9x16 when Dean holds the First Blade for the first time, because, dear God, if that isn’t Dean’s orgasm face than I don’t know what is.
> 
> Also, if you enjoyed this story, feel free to leave a tip on my ko-fi: [LaurAnnPie](https://ko-fi.com/laurannpie)
> 
> (But never feel pressured to provide me money! Comments, Kudos, and Bookmarks are just as adored, and fanworks should always, always be free!)

“First I get lies, you see – this is what happens – first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. That is how you get the truth” – Colonel Joll, _Waiting for the Barbarians_

OOO

One: Robin

Long before his fingers wrapped around the handle of the First Blade and the Mark sang bloodlust through his head, Dean felt cold swill through his veins and recognized it as strumming desire. It’s a pulse he knows as well as his own stuttering heartbeat. 

He’s sixteen when he feels it for the first time. 

Dad’s sprawled, stunned, across the buckled roots of a big oak. The harpy shrieks with the voice of a vulture. Dean hears her wings flutter as she dives back toward ground, talons raised. The silver-tipped arrow of Dad’s discarded crossbow glints in the moonlight. 

Dean is sixteen when he feels it for the first time: the tightening in his gut, the numb concentration of his muscles spiraling inward toward his core. The stillness. Silence. A spring ready to snap. 

Then the crossbow is steady in his hands, wood smooth under his fingers. He braces his legs, just like Dad taught him, sets his shoulders, and lets the arrow fly without a second thought. 

The arrow tears through the harpy’s leathery neck, comes out the other side and leaves a gaping, red hole in its wake. The monster plummets from the air in a tangle of black wings and bloody feathers. Its human-like eyes are still open in surprise, long-lashed and burning. 

And then there’s the recoil. The release: a loose-limbed, tingling pleasure. Ice water in his veins. Buzzing in his ears. The muscles in his belly unclench, and he is undone. 

And Dean’s sixteen when he feels it for the first time. 

Clumsy, awkward, and blushing, Robin grins sheepishly around Dean’s dick in her mouth. Neither of them has done this before. It’s not perfect: her teeth bump against his sensitive skin and he hisses in pain. She mumbles an apology, and tries again. 

Robin’s eyes are fire bright, peering up at Dean through long, mascara-caked lashes. She’s on her knees. Dean’s sitting on the bed with his pants around his ankles. They have to be quiet because there’s a no-girls-allowed policy in Sonny’s dormitories, and Dean’s fairly certain Sonny’s gonna change his mind about letting Dean hang around if he walks in on this, but, then again, Dean’s never been opposed to breaking one, two, or twenty rules to get what he wants. 

After the dance, he thinks, maybe there will be sex. That’s what all the guys are talking about at school. So what, he’s sixteen and still a virgin? It’s not like he’s a _fucking innocent_ or something. He knows plenty about sex: walked in on Caleb and some lady doing it in the pews of Pastor Jim’s church when he was just seven-years-old. He just hasn’t met a girl yet who he’d like to do it with.

And, fuck it, he likes Robin, and not just because she’s so intuitive with her tongue. She’s also funny, and smart, and cute-as-hell. Dean likes working on algebra homework with her in the school library. He likes when she guides his hands over her guitar strings. He likes it when the left side of her lips digs into her cheek and she tells him he’s got a knack for fingering, and he tells her she’s got no idea (because, hell, he had to gain back ground after that disastrous first kiss), and she cocks an eyebrow, tells him maybe later she could find out. He likes how she’s more brazen and self-assured then other girls, doesn’t shy away from the idea of sex like it’s some kind of anathema or she’s some kind of Madonna. 

Dean chokes back a groan as Robin tongues his head. He’s never felt so exposed in front of someone before, so aware that he is not in control of this moment. It both excites him and terrifies him. 

The hole in the harpy’s neck drips blood. His stomach clenches, back arcs, and he can’t help but shut his eyes as energy swarms outward, like an electrical shock radiating from his core. 

He’s orgasmed before, sure. All lotion-slicked hands and paper towels to deal with the cleanup. It’s easiest in the shower, because motel rooms are frikken small, and the walls are thin, and no way is Dad, or, God, Sammy, gonna walk in on him with his dick in his hand. So, yeah, he’s orgasmed before. But not like this. 

She pulls off him with a sloppy pop. There’s cum on her lips. Dean flops backward onto the mattress, breathing hard, body shivering as his climax rocks itself the rest of the way out. 

“That good?” Robin asks. There’s still a shade of uncertainty in her voice, because she’s only sixteen, too, and she’s only ever given hand jobs before, but she also sounds pleased with herself. 

“_Hell_ yeah,” Dean breathes, and Robin beams, and Dean hears the echo of a vulture cry in his ears. 

He’s sixteen when he feels it for the first time: 

Draws some girl he can barely remember the name of (Kelly) into the janitor’s closet. They don’t even take their clothes all the way off. It’s dark in the closet. It smells like Lysol. She has blond hair. She’s thin, bones birdlike and brittle under his fingers. Dean can almost pretend it’s actually Robin. He can almost shove aside the lingering guilt that he forgot to ask Sonny to tell her goodbye. 

Dean tells her he forgot a condom; she tells him it’s okay ‘cuz she’s on the pill. She kisses him hard, needy, cold. Her braces bump against his teeth, and her saliva tastes like blood. 

OOO

Two: Bela

_Oh, the first time you picked up my razor, the first time you sliced into that weeping bitch,_ Alastair croons from where he’s strung up on the rack. 

Bela Talbot is the first soul he tortures in Hell. Dean recognizes her right away, despite the bleached, blood-spattered skin and dark shadows under her eyes that all the souls adopt after the first few days on the meat hooks. 

“Dean…Winchester,” Bela simpers above the band taught across her chin. She is naked, belted down at the hips, chest, wrists, and ankles. They’re a little like dentist chairs, Dean thinks, the particular brand of operating table Hell keeps in its torture chambers: cold metal, angled up at the head, leather straps. But maybe dentist chairs don’t have leather straps. It’s been a long time since Dean’s been to a dentist. 

“Should have known I’d bump into you eventually,” she says. Her teeth are stained with blood. She does not look afraid. But she should. She should be afraid. Dean is afraid. 

“I didn’t know you two were friends,” says Alastair. He has a cool hand on Dean’s shoulder. The cold leaches into Dean’s skin, fills his body with icy tendrils. Alastair is lying. Of course, he is lying. Alastair is made of lies; it’s all he does. 

Except for the fact that the pain has stopped. Alastair promised that the pain would stop if Dean said yes, and even though Dean can’t remember what he said yes to, the pain has stopped. 

“Show me what you’ve got, Deano,” Alastair says, pressing the blade into Dean’s palm. And it’s the same tone Alastair used when he first strung Dean up on the rack, stripped him to just his skin, then to his muscle, down to his bone and hissed _let’s see what you’ve got._

Her first scream rips Dean out of his own body. It feels like freedom. Alastair’s still there, chin on Dean’s shoulder, hand on the small of Dean’s back, cooing words of encouragement and gentle direction into Dean’s ear. But Dean is somewhere far away. 

“It’s a wonder, isn’t it, darling?” Bela whispers, voice a croak, blood trickling down her lips, “that you cracked before me?” 

But torture isn’t about watching someone break, not really. That’s what Alastair taught Dean. Truth is: Dean broke five years before Alastair unchained him. Truth is, Dean begged for his chance to hold the knife long before Alastair gave it to him. 

The master/slave dialectic? It’s reversed. Torture is about surrender. It’s about being owned. And, as soon as Dean’s razor slices flesh, Bela owns him. She’ll own him until his soul finally submits and inky blackness spreads across his eyes, until eternity unspools and all that’s left is ice. 

Dean doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. Bela’s screams fill his head with stillness, silence, cold. He keeps going until he transforms into someone else, until she pleads with her father not to touch her, and Dean understands all about the unfairness of deals made by desperate children. But Hell doesn’t have any rules about contracts signed by minors, so Dean grins and digs his blade in deeper. 

OOO

Three: Alastair 

_But we were so close...in Hell,_ says the demon wearing the pediatrician’s body. Dean, standing in that barn that smells like straw and blood, feels a swoop of sick fear inside his belly. But it feels a little like something else, too: like promise. Like stone-cold, sharp arousal. 

Dean doesn’t know how to categorize a lot of things that happen to him in Hell, mostly because he’s still not entirely sure how the not-having-a-body factors into the equation. Because soul-rape can’t really be rape, can it? Not if he didn’t have a body. Not if he learned to enjoy it. Still, sometimes, wakes up missing the feel of Alastair’s cold blades, fingers, lips, running over and inside his body. 

As soon as Dean crosses the threshold into Alastair’s cell – Uriel and Cas’s eyes burrowing into his back – as soon as he makes the first cut, Alastair bucking under his blade, Dean’s home. The stink of sulfur floods his nose.

There is something undeniably intimate about torture. About being spread-eagle-spread-open on the table, Alastair elbow deep in Dean’s bowels. About taking his salted blade to Alastair’s chest and knowing undoubtedly, gloriously, exactly how much it was going to hurt. About nuzzling into Bela’s ear, her long, blood-tangled hair tickling his jaw, and promising her, “I would kill you if I could.” 

OOO

Four: Lisa 

He and Lisa have plenty of issues, but sex has never been one of them. 

Sex is easy for them, not just because she’s bendy, smooth, and all slippery _smiles hands fingers lips_ across his body, but because her body is something calm and familiar. Safe. 

Dean never knew sex could be gentle before Lisa. Before it was always frantic, urgent, all gasping, clawing one-night-stands and last-night-alives. He’s never had a partner long enough to understand he’s allowed to slow down and just feel. Even Cassie never let him breathe: she was too kinetic for that, too powerful, demanding, and, hell, Dean’s not going to deny that he likes getting bossed around in the bedroom, but Lisa’s different. 

She’s self-assured, but not dominating. She’s seen him choking whiskey into the toilet at four in the morning. She dropped next to him on the garage floor, leaned against the Impala, eased the gun from his hand, and hushed his tears into her lap, combed soft fingers through his greasy hair. She’s patient and kind, presses her lips to the palm of his hand and draws his fingers into her mouth, sucking so carefully it’s like she’s afraid he’ll break. Because he will. And she’s the only one Dean will let watch when it happens. 

And maybe that’s what the difference boils down to: trust. Dean trusts her with his body in a way he’s never truly trusted anyone else. She teaches him that being naked isn’t the same thing as being laid bare. After she tugs him apart from the seams, she stitches him back together with sure, even sutures. Steady, knowing hands. Dean lets her. He lets her and he loves her, even though he never actually says that out loud, even though he gets damn close to it, swallows down the words as she rides him, hands firm against his chest, her core muscles rippling as she rocks. 

_Fuck, Lis. I love you._ Instead he says, “Fuck, Lis. Fucking hell.” 

Ice water through his veins. 

Dean doesn’t know what shifts. It’s something in her eyes: pupils blown wide with endorphins suddenly go soft and vulnerable. Her body, taught legs wired around his hips and she pants open-mouthed against his sweaty forehead, suddenly seems so pliable and small. Putty in his hands as he wraps his fingers around her wrists and wrenches her off him. 

He rolls, pins her to the bed. And maybe it’s just surprise, that Dean sees flicker through her eyes, but Dean reads it as fear. And her fear only feeds the cool, calm fury in his stomach. 

Ice in his blood. Ice in his head. Silent. Still. It would be so easy. So easy to press his thumbs to her windpipe and squeeze. So easy to shove her against the wall. Knock her head against the plaster until she bled, white powder sticking to a gaping wound in her skull and – 

Dean gags. 

_Please don’t. Daddy, please. Not again,_ Bela whimpers and Dean rakes his blade through her flesh. Her blood is tacky and warm on his hands. And _you know, when this is over, we should really have angry sex,_ she purrs in another life. 

_Is this what you had in mind,_ Dean hisses into her ear. He plunges his knife into her squirming, stripped, screaming body, sets a steady rhythm, builds toward climax. He fills her with white-hot, gurgling blood. _Is this what you had in mind, Bela?_

“Dean.” Dean hears rustling sheets somewhere far away. He is on the floor, he registers. Kneeling on the floor, naked and trembling, gasping into his palms. 

He’s still half hard. The need in his stomach is a twisted, pulsing thing that feels more like a disease. Because he can still feel Bela’s splintered ribs under his fingers. He can still hear her desperate pleas. And he wants. He wants. 

“Can I touch you?” Lisa asks. She always asks when Dean’s like this. Maybe she read it in a book, or something. Dean’s seen her doing research when she thinks he won’t notice: flicking through leaflets and webpages about PTSD, panic attacks, and alcohol dependence. Once, tentatively, because she already knew Dean was going to say no, she asked if he wanted to see a shrink. He stubbornly insisted he was fine. She gently reminded him that he spent six hours raking their very small yard the other day. 

“Shit,” Dean breathes, because he isn’t ready to answer her yet. He doesn’t know what to tell her. The answer is _no_. Don’t touch him. Don’t touch him because he will hurt her if she touches him. But Dean wants the answer to be _yes_. Because he wants her to wrap her arms around him, pull him close, whisper gentle things into his hair to ease him trough. 

But, shit, because sex was supposed to be safe. Lisa was supposed to be safe. There are so many things that aren’t safe anymore: sleeping, and drinking, and driving, and shaving, and fucking _thinking._ But sex with Lisa was supposed to be safe. 

He’s shivering, because his blood is still made out of ice. 

“I’m going to cover you with blanket, okay?” Lisa says calmly above him, telegraphing her motions so she doesn’t freak him out, and she has no fucking clue, no idea how close Dean came to snapping her slender, beautiful neck. Dean hears the tug of fabric from the bed. A moment later, something warm and soft falls across his shoulders. 

“Remember what I taught you?” Lisa asks. She crouches in front of him. Dean hears the movement of her shifting legs and whisper of fabric, which means she must have put on a robe. 

“Can you breathe with me, Dean?” she prompts him, keeping her voice soft and nonthreatening. Because she doesn’t realize that it isn’t her who’s the threat: it’s Dean. Lisa’s safe. She’s always been safe. 

It’s Dean who’s not. 

“Inhale through your nose,” she coaches him because he is a fucking child. So fucking incompetent. Can’t even fucking breathe. “One, two, three, four. Hold it for me, sweetheart. One, two, three, four. Now exhale through your mouth. That’s it. Can you do that again?” 

“You’re cold,” she tells him after he’s breathing on his own again. She winds her fingers loose around his wrist and pulls him up, leads him to the bathroom, sits him on the closed toilet seat while she fills the bath with steaming water. 

And it’s one of his favorite things, bathing together: something domestic and simple. Ever since he stumbled into her arms, stinking of sweat and blood and suffocating on Sammy’s absence, and she walked him up to the bathroom, helped him undress because his hands were quivering too hard to work the buttons, soaked away the graveyard filth from his skin. 

But now the warm water does nothing to steal the stone-cold ache from his bones. Now all he can see in the sudsy water she massages into his taught shoulders is her blood, wetting his hair, hands, body. He shuts his eyes and hears screaming. 

OOO

Five: Benny 

Purgatory is a year without sex, and it’s a year without booze. The latter proves to be a shit ton more of an issue. 

The alcohol, which has taken up permanent residence in Dean’s bloodstream over the past decade and a half, but no more so than the past year, doesn’t leave easy. 

It takes less than a day for Dean to understand that his accelerated heartrate isn’t just the result of fighting off those freaking gorilla-wolf things. And, yeah, anxiety and insomnia are only natural in a place where Dean checks over his shoulder so often it’s like he’s got a tick. But then he finally looks down at his tremoring hands, recognizes the not-hunger cramps in his stomach and cloying need in his chest for what it is, takes one last desperate gulp of the drops of whiskey in his flask and thinks _oh shit._

Alastair finds him first. He grins, offers him a knife, _hiya, Deano_ he simpers like he missed him. At some point there’s Ruby, too. The bitch. 

Dean screams at her, “you lousy, lying whore! I gutted you once, I’ll do it again!” and she just cackles as his blade soars through her face and sinks into the trunk of a tree. She tells him all about Sammy, all about Sammy’s lips on her body, sucking, biting, gnawing, needing. 

There are footsteps everywhere. Dean’s not sure whether he’s drawn every army in Purgatory to his location by yelling or if it’s just another hallucination. He doesn’t stick around to find out. He runs. Or tries to, but by then his body is shutting down – all shuddering energy with nowhere to go. An angry, burning hole in his stomach that’s going to eat him alive. 

Dean screams for Cas, begs the angel to come back, wonders whether prayer even works anymore in this shithole, and figures that the answer has to be no because there’s no other explanation he’s willing to accept for why Cas ignores him. 

He screams until he goes hoarse. Then he whimpers for Sammy. Tells his brother he’s sorry. So goddamn sorry. And he cradles Sammy, so small, squirmy, warm against his pajama-clad chest, and whispers _it’s okay. I’m your big brother, Sammy. I won’t let it get you. Won’t let it hurt you,_ only Dean doesn’t really whisper, just nuzzles his nose against Sammy’s fuzzy head and thinks it real hard, because that was right after the big fire that ate Mommy up and even though Daddy begged Dean to talk, promised him ice cream and gummy bears and a new toy firetruck, Dean couldn’t make the sounds in his throat work anymore. 

At some point, a hellhound comes snuffling and clawing at the burrow Dean’s made for himself under the roots of one of the trees. Dean stabs wildly with his knife. Something skitters away, whimpering loudly, trailing droplets of blood, so dark it’s almost black. Dean’s own blood boils and he drowns in tearing flesh and t-shirts. Sammy screams as Dean’s dragged by the leg off that table and hits the floor hard, but not hard enough to miss the next part. 

Eventually, Dean wakes up drenched in his own sweat and piss. He’s shivering, but the worst of it, he thinks, is over. He’s also goddamn parched, and he ventures out of his makeshift shelter in search of anything that resembles water. 

That turns out to be his first mistake because he stumbles right into a gang of ghouls. But the monsters are sloppy and lazy after feasting off a couple werewolf corpses, and Dean takes them down easily; blames the slash one of them leaves cross his shoulder on the fact that he’s still so weak and disoriented from his unexpected detox. 

And that silky, cold calm? It finds Dean in Purgatory, too. The place is full of it. It coats the inside of Dean’s lungs until he’s choking on it. Even though it’s warm in Purgatory – God’s armpit kinda warm, air sultry with humidity, steam coming off the rotting leaves on the ground – Dean’s always cold. Always shaking. Like his body is thrumming with some kind of energy, both within and without, too much and too little. 

Eventually, there’s Benny, who Dean stuffs into the gaping hole Sammy and Cas left inside his chest. And then there are the vetalas, which hunt in pairs. Purgatory doesn’t change that. 

One jumps Benny, leaping out of the trees with a wild whoop of fever-crazed bloodlust. Benny goes down hard. He doesn’t have time to grab his blade off his belt before Dean’s there: Dean takes off the vetala’s head with one steady swipe of his obsidian ax, dousing Benny with her dark blood. 

Her sister gets Dean from behind. Dean collapses under her weight. Her legs wrap around his waist. His forehead cracks against a root. His head fills with a high-pitched buzz. But his body keeps moving, because if you stop moving in Purgatory you die: quick and bloody. 

Dean rolls so he pins her writhing body under his back. He snaps his head back and connects with her jaw, which dislodges her grip around his body enough for him to squirm out of her grasp and roll again – but she rolls with him. 

It’s like some kind of perverted reflection of sex: now he’s back on the bottom. She’s got him pinned, knees digging into his pelvis. Fangs all up close and personal in his face. He can smell the rot on her breath. 

But his hand is free, and he pushes upward with his blade. He buries it up to the hilt in her chest at the same time her fangs sink into his throat. The venom hits him immediately. The sickly-sweet warmth of it slips into his bloodstream and makes everything fuzzy. 

Everything is alright. Dean doesn’t understand why he was fighting. He can stop now. Just sleep. Everything is warm. Slow. He is so tired. 

“Come on, boss!” Benny’s hands paw at Dean’s shoulders, drags him into a sitting position against a tree. “Stay with me, chief. Come on.” 

Benny’s hand claps against the gushing wound in the side of Dean’s neck. Dean looks with detached interest at his body: he is covered in blood. So much blood he can smell it. 

“Gotta –” Benny’s Adam’s apple bobbles. His eyes are glued to the blood sluggishly pumping from Dean’s neck. “Gotta get the venom out, chief.” 

Dean can’t make his voice work. His words are too heavy. He can feel Benny’s hands trembling from where they clutch at Dean’s throat. _Kill me,_ he wants to tell Benny. He doesn’t understand why he thinks it, he just knows that, in that moment, there will be no greater pleasure than being sucked dry by his friend. 

“Dean?” Benny’s voice is tight. Worried. Tense. So fucking insistent. Benny licks his lips. His eyes drag away from Dean’s blood and find Dean’s eyes. “You trust me, brother?” 

Dean swallows with difficulty. He can taste blood on the back of his tongue. His blood. He wonders what Benny’s blood would taste like. 

“I…trust you,” Dean murmurs, lips numb. 

Benny swallows again. He breaks eye-contact to dip his head toward Dean’s neck. With one hand he angles Dean’s head to give him a cleaner view of Dean’s throat. With the other hand, he grips Dean’s upper arm hard enough to hurt. 

Benny’s lips latch onto Dean’s flesh. Dean’s head swarms with a combination of pain and strange relief as Benny take a long drag of Dean’s blood. Dean can feel it working, can feel the tug as the venom leaves his body. 

Benny disconnects, spits over Dean’s shoulder, turns back to Dean and grins. His fangs are pink. “Fucking disgusting,” he says. “Bet you’d be pretty sweet without that filth, too. Oh well.” 

Then he goes back down for another pull. Spits again, comes back up with a grimace, then goes down for a third time. Benny lips are rough and chapped, Dean realizes hazily. He is dizzy and disconnected from blood loss. 

Benny is just a soul. Not technically embodied. Plus, he’s undead. So, by all counts, he shouldn’t be warm. But Benny’s mouth is certainly warm on Dean’s skin. His tongue is scalding hot as it prods Dean’s wound. 

This is the closest Dean’s been to a body in a long time – a body that wasn’t actively trying to kill him, that is. Dean can smell Benny: all dirt and blood and sweat and unwashed skin. It is, Dean realizes, and wonders if the venom’s doing something strange to his brain, one of the more tantalizing things Dean’s ever smelled in his life. 

Benny comes up for the last time, and Dean misses the rough, wet contact. Benny rubs his mouth roughly on his sleeve. He shakes his head, laughs, “Fucking sobriety, right, chief?” Benny is shaking all over. He’s panting, and he licks his lips again, maybe to savor the last taste of Dean’s blood. 

Dean brings his hand up and manages to clumsily pat Benny on the arm. “Thanks,” he breathes, and slumps against the tree, not aware until now how tightly he’d been holding his body. 

“Don’t mention it,” Benny says gruffly. He sits up on his heels. “Better get it patched, eh?” 

Dean sits in silence as Benny scrounges for a swath of fabric to tie around Dean’s neck. Dean’s heart is still thudding too-quickly in his chest. He blames it on the waning adrenaline, the deep-seated ache that comes from the multiple bruises and scratches that pockmark his body. He doesn’t understand why he’s suddenly so aware of that one time, when he was twenty-five and a girl asked him if he was into erotic asphyxiation. He wasn’t. But whatever. She seemed to have a good time. 

“Want me to take care of that for you, chief?” Benny says, his voice is a growl. Benny’s hand lands on Dean’s groin, over the bulge tenting his jeans. 

What happens next isn’t exactly pleasure and isn’t exactly pain. It lives between the lines of rapture and regret. Because there’s no such thing as day or night in Purgatory, it’s all just gradations of dark. And that’s the thing about Purgatory: its hybridity. The in-betweenness. Dean tries to explain it to Sammy at some point, but he can only fumble his tongue around the word _pure._

And it is pure. Pure in the sense that it doesn’t belong anywhere. It lives in the realm between heart-thudding right and gut-twisting wrong. Afterall, something that’s Hell Adjacent has to be Heaven Adjacent, too. And Dean thrives in the space between kill or be killed. He revels in the hurt, blood, pain – some of it his and most of it someone else’s. Hurting people. Killing things. The Dean Winchester business. 

But then Dean gets sucked through the swirling, blue-lightning vortex back home and the daydream/nightmare ends. 

Purgatory is pure until it’s not, until he startles awake in motel rooms smelling rotting leaves, tasting blood, shivering. Just like Sammy is pure until he’s not, until he hits a dog somewhere in buttfuck Texas. Or Cas is pure until he’s not, until Dean let him go – didn’t let him go – whatever. Someone let someone go. And Benny is pure until he’s not, until he sounds so small and desperate on the phone, and Dean hangs up.

Dean understands, then, that pure is a misnomer. It belonged in Purgatory, but not back on Earth. Because on Earth, Dean knows nothing is pure, least of all himself. 

Because he was sixteen when he felt it for the first time. 

When Dean takes off Benny’s head with one clean, cruel swipe, he remembers how the circular saw stuttered and choked as it cut through that vamp’s spine, spattering Dean’s face with blood. Gordon Walker looked on in delighted approval, maybe longing, and Sammy looked on in disgust and fear. And Dean never felt so right. So absolutely at peace. 

Then Benny’s head bobbles on the ground and his decapitated body slumps forward, leaking blood from the stump where its neck once was, and Dean remembers that his blood was the last time Benny ever tasted it fresh. And it must have been cold. So damn cold. Because there’s ice water in Dean’s veins and it never stops. 

OOO

Six: Magnus 

“Give me your hand!” Magnus, or Cuthbert-Sinclair-whatever-the-douchewad’s-name-is, growls and snatches Dean’s wrist. 

Magnus claps the Blade against Dean’s palm. Dean’s fingers close around the handle of their own accord, and he gasps, because it’s like electrocution. His heart spasms in his chest as he writhes in a puddle at the foot of a bellowing rawhead. 

“That’s it.” Magnus takes a step back, smiles. The Mark on Dean’s arm glows fiery red, but it doesn’t burn hot. It burns cold. A resonating chill that burrows inside him, bone deep. 

_La petite mort,_ Dean thinks stupidly. The chains around his shoulders bite into his skin. The First Blade vibrates up his arm, sending shockwaves through his body, turning the rest of him into a quivering mess. If he wasn’t fastened to the pillar at his back, he’d be on his knees. 

It means “little death” which somehow translates to orgasm, which somehow Sam knew at thirteen, when he thought telling Dean weird things like that would make his big brother believe Sammy wasn’t still grossed out by the thought of sex. 

The Blade’s power judders up his muscles, floods his body with too much and too little at the same time. Everything in Dean’s head goes still, silent, and cold. Ice water in his veins. It’s all silky, wet desire, something raw and uninhibited. And Dean wants. Oh my God, he wants. 

Magnus teepees his hands in front of his mouth. Hunger flashes through his eyes when he looks at Dean and the First Blade, like Dean’s just another monster in his zoo. 

And Dean knows all about exhibitionism. He knows about edging, too, dragged so close to climax only to be dropped back to floor, strings cut, hanging loose and wanting, so desperately wanting, body keening – 

Dean drops the Blade. He’s too preoccupied with the horrible tear of power stripped from his body to hear the thud on the ground. 

“Good,” Magnus exhales, like he thinks he’s Emperor Freaking Palpatine or some shit. He bends to retrieve the Blade. 

Dean’s stomach closes around open air: a gaping hole the power left when it fled his body. His fingers are still shaking. They feel like they’ve been frostbitten black, but Dean looks, and they still just look like fingers. But in a disembodied sense: they are someone else’s fingers. Someone else’s hand. Someone else’s body. Dean is somewhere far away, still flooded with cold numbness, but now it’s empty, rather than soothing. 

“Next time,” Magnus promises. “It’ll be easier. You’ll get used to the feelings. Even welcome them.” 

Magnus is right, Dean thinks later, when he swings the Blade through the bastard’s neck, catching blood in teeth and polished jawline. Dean’s body rises to meet the pulsing energy, the familiar climax, fluttering relief. It’s cold calm, stillness, right. And Dean’s been there before. He knows the taste of it, by now, bitter on his tongue.

Really, it’s just an unnecessary precaution that the Blade’s unsatiated bloodlust results in Dean literally coughing up his organs. Dean doesn’t need the extra incentive to kill. And Sammy insists that Dean is good. At his core that Dean is good. But Sam doesn’t know. Not really. 

He doesn’t know how desperately Dean wants the excuse to just let go, to envelope himself fully in the blood-thrumming joy of blood and bones and breaking. Sammy doesn’t know that Dean likes the ice in his veins, the thrill of anticipation that shivers up his spine when he hears the screams. 

Dean was sixteen when he felt it for the first time. 

OOO

Seven: Abaddon 

And what is it, really? What’s up with demons and their sexual metaphors? Abaddon’s red fingernails curl like claws through Dean’s hair. 

“You know, I loved this body since the moment I first saw it.” She grabs for the buttons of his shirt. Dean reacts on impulse to stop her, but his hands scrabble pointlessly against hers. He is powerless, utterly, delightfully powerless under her grip. “You’re the perfect vessel, Dean.” Her cherry red lips curl into a grin. Her eyes blaze into his own. 

His stomach twists in fear. Except it isn’t really fear. Dean knows it isn’t really fear, and he hates himself for knowing it. 

“You give a girl all sorts of nasty ideas. So go ahead and play hard to get.” She promises him with another smile, “And I’ll peel off this no demons allowed tattoo.” 

Abaddon: Angel of Death, the Destroyer. 

She grips his jaw, fingers scraping against stubble, and she purrs, “And blow smoke up your ass.” 

When Dean sticks her, later – lifts her off her feet, holds her suspended in the air, her full weight on the Blade – it’s a whole new kind of penetration: Alastair and Bela and Abaddon and the whole host of Hell all at once, gutted on the Blade. In this moment, the Blade owns them all. And Dean? Dean is owned by the Blade. 

And it feels damn good. A fucking relief, really. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Dean knows that everything on earth is really about sex. Except sex. Sex is really about power. And shit, yeah, does Dean understand power as he plows the Blade through that bitch’s chest (again and again and again). 

He’s had wall sex plenty of times before, watched girls bare their necks in extasy like they’re begging Dean to tear out their throats with his teeth. But it’s never been quite like this. 

The Blade hums through his body. Ice in his veins. 

So, yeah, sex is about power. About control. In the same way torture is about control. And killing is about control. But it’s not about gaining control. 

It’s about losing it.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr where I psychoanalyze the boys, dissect incredibly minute details about the show, post bits and pieces about my fic, and look for friends: [foolondahill17](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/foolondahill17)


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